With marauding ancient Dane in his DNA JOHN INGHAM is exhilarated to discover the dramatic heritage of his ancestral land

WE  PULLED on the oars like arthritic galley slaves and then, out in the open fjord, the skipper unfurled the square sail. With that, our Viking longboat sprang to life like a stallion let out of the stables after a long winter. It was then that we - and about 30 other tourists - got a taste of life on the ocean waves, Viking-style.

And at Roskilde's Viking Ship Museum, about an hour's drive from Copenhagen, it was easy to see how these superb vessels had ruled the waves from Newfoundland to the Caspian Sea.

At this point I should declare an interest. I am, apparently, a Viking.

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A year ago I had DNA tests with Oxford Ancestors and found that on my mother's side I am of Irish stock. On my father's side I am descended from Danish Vikings.

So I went to Denmark to retrace my Viking past and was stunned by the diversity of the sites.

We started at Roskilde where five Viking wrecks, probably sunk to block the fjord from an attack by Norwegian invaders, have been pulled from the waters and are on show in an impressive museum.

Better still, the experts have now recreated the ships to discover how the Vikings became a byword for amphibious terror. The jewel in their crown is the Sea Stallion from Glendalough, 100ft of blue, yellow and red power which can surge through the seas at 13.5 knots.

Readers may remember it from a TV documentary charting its rain-sodden voyage in 2007 from Denmark to Dublin, where the original was built in 1042.

Our guide was Preben Rather Sorensen, 44, who completed the return voyage. Asked how tough the Vikings were, Preben said: "On a scale of one to 10, they were 12."

These hard, violent men also left their mark in a series of identical circular forts, including Trelleborg on Zealand and Fyrkat in east Jutland. Now a collection of distinct grassy mounds, they were the Millennium Dome of their day. Both were built by ruler Harald Bluetooth in 980 and abandoned by 990.

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Reconstructions, including full-scale longhouses, which look like upside-down boats, have brought them back to life. At Trelleborg we stumbled upon a Viking wedding. Gardener Bue, 32, sporting long fair hair, a beard and medieval smock shirt, and primary school teacher Siff, 25, decked out in a Titania-style diaphanous green dress, were celebrating their nuptials in the late summer sun, accompanied by wassailing and Viking music on drums and fiddle.

The feast was in the longhouse.

Bue told me: "I was in Trelleborg on military service, got to learn about the Vikings and became hooked. I decided that if I got married I would do so under the willow tree and have my reception in the long hall."

Vikings get you like that.

At Fyrkat there was a reconstructed Viking village, complete with pastel-walled thatched houses which you still see around Denmark, just as described by Hans Christian Andersen.
There, over a smoky fire in a longhouse, my children, Tom, 14, and Charlotte, 17, baked Viking flat bread, a bit like pitta bread and very tasty. After just 20 minutes we reeked of smoke. Thor only knows what the Vikings smelled like after being cooped up for the winter.

At the Moesgard Museum just south of Aarhus we stepped back even further in time. The star attraction is Grauballe Man, a poor devil sacrificed 2,300 years ago and thrown into the nearby peat bog to appease the spirits.

He was dug up in 1952 and is so well preserved, if a little leathery, that you can see his toenails, his expression, the stubble on his chin, and the deep cut from ear to ear by which he was despatched.

But I would have faced a mutiny if I had spent the whole holiday dragging my children round Viking sites. For the first two nights we stayed in the pretty town of Køge, half an hour's drive south of Copenhagen, staying at the clean and simple Hotel Niels Juel.

Then we caught the high-speed ferry from the north-west tip of Zealand to east Jutland for five nights in a beautifully appointed Novasol cottage just a two-minute walk from the beach.

In July these sand dunes are crowded but by August, with Danish children back at school, we had the beach virtually to ourselves, watching the swallows gather for their migration south.

Our days consisted of football on the beach, cycling through the countryside, reading books and drinking wine on the verandah, paddling in the surprisingly mild and shallow waters of the Baltic and strolling down to the beachside Wafflehouse for some superb ice cream.

From this idyllic base we visited Grenaa, a charming town with a beach voted Denmark's number two: five miles of empty dunes and white sand so fine it squeaks when you walk on it. Heaven knows what the top beach is like.

In Grenaa - pronounced Graynow - we had lunch at the Hotel Dagmar where I ate one of my best-ever burgers.
We also found time to visit the Scandinavian Deerpark near Tirstrup, a zoo with spacious enclosures which are home to the vanishing wildlife of the region, including a wolf pack, brown bears whose cubs playfought in the water and polar bears which get five tons of ice a day.

One or two myths about Scandinavia need to be dispelled.

First the cost. Meals out are pricey but if you go self-catering you will find Danish prices only slightly higher than here. Beer in a bar, for example, can set you back about £6. Four pints in the supermarket are yours for £5.

Then there's the weather. It's obviously quite variable, with Copenhagen on about the same latitude as Northumberland. But we had two days of Mediterranean sunshine with the rest of the stay like a good English summer.

In fact, as we drove off to Aalborg airport for the flight home, only one question puzzled me: why had my ancestors, the Vikings, ever wanted to leave Denmark in the first place?
 
THE KNOWLEDGE:
Norwegian (0208 099 7254/www.norwegian.com) offers return flights from London to Copenhagen from £56. The Hotel Niels Juel (dialling from UK: 00 45 5663 1800/www.hotelnielsjuel.dk) offers doubles from £150 per night (two sharing), B&B.

Novasol Cottages (3914 3222/www.novasol.co.uk) offers seven nights staying in a self-catering cottage in Fjellerup Strand from £320 (four sharing). Europcar (0871 384 9847/c) offers car hire from £414 per week. Visit Denmark: 0207 259 5955/www.visitdenmark.com